"How many things do you want networked in your house?" he mused. If Verizon's Open Access program takes off, you could see digital cameras, home appliances, and gaming systems all tacked on to Verizon accounts for incremental sums - $5 per device on top of a base plan, for instance.

Verizon execs stayed coy on how much the actual plans for open devices would cost, except to say that they'd be competitive with existing plans. Data will be charged by the megabyte, but that won't always be visible to the consumer. For instance, if a company wants to put out a handheld gaming device on Verizon's network, they could estimate the amount of traffic they expect their users to use, buy that number of megabytes from Verizon and charge the users a flat fee, hiding the megabyte pricing.

So how does this all fit in with phones?

At one of the breakout sessions during the conference, David Hind from the CDMA Development Group mentioned that Verizon will be monitoring and updating a standards document on RUIMs - essentially, SIM cards for CDMA phones.

Like SIM cards, RUIM cards make it easy for you to have multiple phones that you switch between whenever you like. They do not make Verizon's CDMA phones compatible with GSM phones. Let me repeat:

They will not make iPhones work on Verizon.
They will not make iPhones work on Verizon.
They will not make iPhones work on Verizon.
They will not make iPhones work on Verizon.
They will not make iPhones work on Verizon.
No amount of wishful thinking, begging or hoping will ever make an Apple iPhone work on Verizon.

But they're cool anyway. So cool that Hind backed away quickly when I asked if Verizon will be supporting RUIMs, saying that he didn't know. Neither did a few Verizon folks I asked. If they do, it could make Verizon's open phones even more open by letting you switch between phones as easily as popping out a card.